unbalanced sound through earphones on PC Engine GT

[BEERS AND VIDEOS]

I never noticed it before, but if I fully insert my headphones, I get low sound on the right, normal sound on the left. If I pull out the headphone plug about half way, it seems to come through both earphones equally. Is this normal?

[hoobs88]

No, but I've had that happen on several other electronic devices with headphone jacks.

[nat]

BEERS, that's because each sound channel (left and right) has it's own set of capacitors. Sounds like the capacitors for the right channel have partially failed. If you've already had a capacitor replacement on your GT, it's highly likely only the capacitors for the left channel were replaced.

Pulling the plug out halfway isn't really "fixing" the problem, when you do this you're essentially downmixing the sound to mono (duplicating either the left or right channel across both channels) so it sounds like each channel are at equal volumes.

[BEERS AND VIDEOS]

That makes sense. I didn't realize each channel had its own capacitors.

Anyone up for replacing some capacitors?

[BlueBMW]

I recently fixed a unit that had low sound on the headphones on one channel... there are two 100uf caps next to the 33uf ones (for the regular speaker) that go bad and cause trouble with the headphones audio.  I'm a little buried in repair work for the next month and a half or so, but if you haven't found someone to do it by then, let me know!